Climate doom and gloomism aside, we're headed in the right direction.
Well natural gas is a bright spot because unless I'm wrong we aren't really exporting that the way we are exporting refined gasoline so despite the wishes of big oil we may actually be able to keep the price of natural gas low.
Refined gasoline won't fall in price until we have exported enough to drop prices on the global market. I am not an expert but I don't see that happening any time soon. In fact we are the low cost producer of refined gasoline and export it to Mexico! So yeah Michelle Bachmann's lunacy about $2 gas is plain idiocy.
We're never going to impact global supply enough to do that, even with current production levels. There's certainly nothing stopping Saudi Arabia or Venezuela from cutting back output to boost prices.
As for natural gas, you have the infrastructure problem when it comes to exporting the stuff. Sure, you can ship it out in liquid form, but that costs money. Ultimately, the Russians are going to have the advantage of being connected to Asia, Europe and Africa by overland pipelines. I don't think allowing export of our supply is going to prohibitively raise domestic prices for that reason - we'll only be exporting so much.
As for the virtues of cheap natural gas, there are negative consequences to that too. You're killing the already weak Appalachian economy, not to mention the railroads that don't have carloads of coal to ship anymore.
